What I have previously mentioned illustrates one danger from sitting on the ground, and I may give another instance which occurred to me in 1891.  I had gone after a tiger, and my shikari had prepared an excellent seat on a tree at an absolutely safe height.  The tiger, however, had shifted his ground, it appears, to an adjacent jungle.  This consisted of one long and rather deep ravine, with several spurs at which the tiger might break.  It had several times previously happened that tigers had come up the bottom of this ravine, and I had once killed one there from a tree in the jungle, but the trees so situated are difficult to ascend, and we did not wish to make a noise nor to waste time by making a ladder, so I determined on sitting on the ground in the jungle, about twenty yards from the bottom of the ravine, and made myself perfectly comfortable.  While keeping an eye on the bottom of the ravine up which the tiger was expected to pass, I was suddenly startled by a roar from some little distance behind us.  My old shikari at once saw the danger we were in, and looked extremely disturbed, and no wonder, for he saw at once that the tiger had been driven back by a stop at one of the spurs, and might come down on us from behind, so that we should have had no chance of seeing him till he was almost on the top of us, and as a matter of fact he did pass down into the ravine rather higher up and just out of our sight, and from this we failed to dislodge him.  On the whole, for every reason, I am much against sitting on the ground.  You are liable to be run into sometimes, as we have seen, and at others you are not high enough up to command the ground, and there is a greater chance of driving a tiger back on the beaters.  There are, however, occasions when one must sit on the ground, and if you have occasion to do so, it is of course advisable always to try and get about twenty or thirty yards on one side of the course the tiger is likely to take, and always let him pass your line of fire before firing.  It is also of great importance to have as your second man one who can remain absolutely motionless when a tiger is advancing towards him.  To illustrate the importance of this I may mention the following incident: 

I was posted one day in a tree, when the tiger charged back through the beaters with a roar, and I had at once to get down and run to another point of the jungle to cut him off.  I then tried to get up a tree on the grass land near the edge of the jungle, and next tried another a little further off, but could not got up into it, and when the beat recommenced there was nothing for it but to sit down beside a bush about one hundred yards from the jungle, and on ground on almost exactly the same level as the tiger would have to traverse.  But this bush was so small that it only partially concealed me, and the entire body of my native second gun-bearer was exposed to view.  This man fortunately had a most remarkable power of sitting absolutely motionless under any circumstances